Mounthly Archives: January 2013

BillionGraves loves all of our users! To show how much we appreciate you, we are giving you (yes, everyone) a FREE BillionGraves Plus subscription for the month of February! (For our users who have already purchased BillionGraves Plus, we’ll give you an extra month on your membership.)

Thank you for donating your time, efforts, and energy to the BillionGraves project!

During this month, be sure to take advantage of these special features. You can read about each of the features of BillionGraves Plus below or you can watch the BillionGraves Plus video to see what you’ll be getting!

FavoritesBookmark your favorite BillionGraves records and organize them into groups. This makes them easy to access later when you want to bring up their record quickly.

Here’s how you do it:

Login to your BillionGraves account.

Find the record you would like to mark as a “Favorite” (you can do this by clicking on the Search tab at the top of the BillionGraves homepage).

Go to the top right hand corner and click on the black star.

This will bring up a box where you can either put the image in an already existing category or create a new category.

Click save!

How to access your favorites:

Click on the Tools tab on the BillionGraves homepage.

Click on “Favorites.”

The list of all your bookmarked records in their categories will come up.

Click on the name of the person whose record you want to see.

Record Watches
Get notified by email when a new record is added with a family name and location that matches your criteria. For instance, if you are interested in the Peterson line of your family that lived in Boston, Massachusetts, you could be notified when a new record is added that matches your criteria.

Here’s how you do it:

Login to your BillionGraves account.

Go to the Notifications tab on the BillionGraves homepage.

Click on “Create Record Watch.”

Type in the Surname you want to be notified of.

Optionally, you can filter the records by location. Add a Country, State, County or City using the drop-down boxes.

Click Save!

When new records are added, a notification will be sent to your email.

Virtual Walkthrough / Nearby Records
Every wonder who was buried nearby a family plot? Now you can find out without leaving home. Just imagine what previously unknown relatives are waiting to be discovered!

Here’s how you do it:

Login to your BillionGraves account.

Go to a record that you want to “look around.” (Use the Search page or one of your Favorites)

Click on the “Nearby Records” tab at the top of the page.

Nearby records will be listed along the left edge. Click on one to take a closer look!

The map on the right shows the location of the original record and the nearby record that you just clicked on. The orange pin is the original record and the bouncing blue pin is where the nearby record is located.

To view the detailed page for nearby records, click on the blue name below the image box.

As the records keep pouring in by the thousands, transcribers are persistently making them available to be searched. Now we are happy to announce that those records will be more readily available to genealogists worldwide.

Similar to our relationship with Family Search, BillionGraves has also teamed up with Ancestry to make BillionGraves records available to be indexed and referenced on Ancestry.com. This means that anyone searching for family records on Ancestry can have access to BillionGraves records without having to do a separate search on the BillionGraves page.

We are very excited to be partnered with such a fantastic company! This new development will vastly increase the amount of access people worldwide will have in finding and preserving family records.

BillionGraves is a huge fan of Scouting! Already we have had many scouts organize their Eagle Projects to capture and record images for BillionGraves. We couldn’t be more thrilled!

To show our gratitude and support for these awesome scouts—thanks to American Monument—BillionGraves is giving away granite plaques to every scout who uploads 10,000 images or more for their Eagle Scout Project. This beautiful plaque (see example on right) is our way of honoring these ambitious young men who have put in hours of service for the benefit of others.

BillionGraves is a worldwide project that gives people more access to their ancestor’s records than ever before. Using BillionGraves for your Eagle Scout project is not only free, but very meaningful. Through using modern technology, you can make these records available to families all over the world!

If you know of anyone looking for an Eagle Scout project, recommend BillionGraves to them and have them check out our Eagle Scout information packet for more details. We are happy to help you organize your Eagle Project and answer any questions you might have.

BillionGraves was recently acquired by Otter Creek Holdings (based in Ogden, Utah). Otter Creek Holdings and it’s subsidiaries, My Legacy Memorial and Legacy Mobile, understand the connection people have to Family History. So BillionGraves could not have asked for a better home!

BillionGraves will ALWAYS be a free service. Our primary goal is and will always be to make records found in cemeteries readily available to people everywhere. We will ensure this by leaving both our website AND mobile app free of charge. For our avid users, we offer extended services including extra record watches, access to all BillionGraves records on your mobile device, and virtual walkthroughs of any cemetery on your device and more are offered through our BillionGraves Plus Account. This is available for only $9.99 per year and coming soon, users will be able to earn the same features by uploading or transcribing enough records (see below).

The BillionGraves team is always seeking to improve the site. We have an excellent team (see About Us page) that is constantly trying to make our site run smoother, be more user friendly, and adjust with the constant growth. With the new owners, this vision will not change. We are still passionate about our goal and we are always focused on reaching it. If you have any feedback for us on what you do or don’t like or any features you think should be added, please email us at info@billiongraves.com. We’d love to hear your input!

This new change is an opportunity for growth. We are especially excited for this change in ownership because it means that BillionGraves will only continue to grow (see below). We are still focused on building the largest headstone database and we won’t stop at one billion graves either!

We still can’t do it without YOU! You are our top priority and we are so grateful for the millions of contributions you make. Thank you for your continuing efforts! Spread the word to your family and friends, too! The more the merrier at BillionGraves!

And BillionGraves is expanding!

Here are some great things you can look forward to:

We are improving our partnership with FamilySearch. Our developers are improving automated methods of connecting BillionGraves records to those at FamilySearch. Very soon, users will have the ability to look up a person on FamilySearch and see the BillionGraves records attached to that person. This will include the reverse as well: users will be able to link BillionGraves records to people found in FamilySearch.

More incentive programs are coming soon! So start warming up your smart phones and transcribing fingers! Pretty soon you can earn free things (in the past we’ve given away iPads, T-shirts, BillionGraves Plus Account features and more) with the amount of pictures you take or transcribe.

BillionGraves is forming connections with My Legacy Memorial. BillionGraves is proud to be a part of a company who is involved in other genealogy projects such as My Legacy Memorial—a company that puts QR codes on headstones that are linked to a tribute page online about that individual’s life. This turns that headstone into a living memorial where family, friends, historians, or visitors can learn more about them by merely scanning that QR code with their smartphone. Coming soon, the records found on My Legacy Memorial will connect to those at BillionGraves, providing more complete and meaningful records.

More useful services for BillionGraves are on their way! In an effort to make BillionGraves bigger and better, we are making the services we offer on our website and app more useful. For instance, developers are currently making it possible to create family connections and relationships between records already on BillionGraves. Keep an eye out for more upcoming improvements in our system!

Thank you for your loyalty and enthusiasm at this exciting time of growth and expansion!